Presented by John Mullan and Claire Armitstead and produced by Tim Maby

Friday 8 February 2013 08.50 EST
First published on Friday 8 February 2013 08.50 EST

In her award-winning book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, Kate Summerscale tells the story of a notorious 19th-century murder at a respectable house in Wiltshire.

The Road Hill House Murder was to scandalise Victorian society, opening the door on the hidden horrors of social snobbery and ushering in the first modern detective - Jack Whicher. As Summerscale explains to the book club, the scandal also led to the birth of the detective novel, inspiring a generation of writers, from Wilkie Collins to Arthur Conan Doyle, to take up a theme of the country house murder that has been with us ever since.